Thoughts on Poetry by Emily Dickinson

Poets encapsulate their world in words and then spread it to others. Emily Dickinson’s poetry is great because it’s so compact, yet so nuanced. She’s also very hard to understand because she uses words and enjambment in such unconventional ways. 

Dickinson was able to be unconventional because she isolated herself from the world, and therefore was isolated from influences to her poetry. (This makes one wonder if she would be the same artist were she living in today’s globalized culture. Is it even possible—with television, telephones, and other things starting with “tele”—to be immune to globalized media in a way that will render one’s art truly unconventional?)

There is a correct and incorrect method of interpreting poetry. Discovering Dickinson’s true intended meaning can vary from difficult to pretty much impossible. The more I try to understand, the more I know that I do not understand. The more I read these poems, the more questions I think up. Any answers I devise only serve to multiply said questions. 

So, when I’m presented with a poem like I cannot live with you to interpret, I inevitably get tangled up in phrases like “my Right of Frost.” To Frost makes better sense in the context of the speaker having the right to die before her lover. But the use of “of” instead must be important—Dickinson was too deliberate to randomly conjunct. So, what does it mean? Fine, I’ll admit I’m not at all sure.  Maybe it’s a reference to the phrase “rite of passage” since the next stanzas deal with the afterlife, and so death could be a rite of passage to heaven or hell.

Wild Nights

Dickinson’s love poems are interesting since as far as we know, she was never publicly involved with anyone.  Not that this would be all that unusual in her lifetime: public romance was considered improper, so basically sneaking around was considered good taste. For Wild Nights in particular, it’s hard to pinpoint where Dickinson is going with the metaphor of ships at sea. Is she out to sea (as Stanza III would suggest), or in sheltered harbor (in Stanza I, leaving Stanza II indeterminate)?

I felt a funeral

Dickinson imagines a funeral, the imagining of which allows some epiphany to occur, even as her mind goes numb from creating this scenario.  The box being lifted is a coffin, which is being carried in procession to the funeral. Then a “Plank in Reason broke,” which I picture as the support of the coffin snapping, dropping the body. Perhaps Dickinson meant that she had experience a passive existence, but then realized that she could not remain in that state of complete isolation, and so “hit a world at every plunge, / And Finished knowing—then—“

I heard a Fly buzz

Taken literally, this poem is pretty simple—but then, we know that since it’s by Emily Dickinson we can’t take ANYTHING literally!—relating a scene of someone on their deathbed whose last image is of a fly hovering between the windows. The “windows” in this poem represent the eyes of the dying narrator. Looking at this poem with fresh eyes—or windows, as it were—the last stanza indicates the metaphysical meaning of the poem in general. In this stanza, the narrator sees the fly. Flies are associated negatively with death (and for good reason), but in this poem the negative connotation is absent.   

Even though this poem is about death, there is no desperation and little sadness in the tone. Instead the narrator seems accepting, released, and even interested in the actions of the fly. The last line “I could not see to see” perhaps refers to the narrator wishing to see what the fly would do next.  Instead, the narrator is reduced to merely listening to the fly’s buzzing, which hearkens back to the first lines—“I heard a Fly buzz—when I died—”